My Interview With Hariri, The Man of the People

I found out that I was interviewing presidential candidate Abul Ezz El Hariri the day before the interview, which meant that I had to review the career of a man who has been in politics for over 30 years in less than 24 hours. While it was no easy task, there was something about El Hariri’s unorthodox legacy in politics that got me excited for our scheduled conversation together. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I knew that I was walking in to meet a big personality known for stirring the political scene’s pot. Instead, I found that El Hariri had a sort of quiet charm about him. Sitting in his office at the Socialist Popular Alliance Party’s downtown headquarters, El Hariri was enjoying a simple mid-day meal of foul and ta’ameya while quietly answering the questions of another reporter. It seemed that his office was swarming with media that day as another crew from Al Jazeera was already setting up their equipment to film with El Hariri and a foreign journalist was in line after our time slot. Responding to questions all day had obviously taken its toll on the 44-year-old man as he was visibly exhausted, with his eyes almost closing shut a couple of times. But El Hariri still seemed eager to deliver his message properly to each reporter. He spoke quite eloquently and in full, long sentences — even if at times it seemed that he was sort of reciting carefully revised statements. It was only towards the end that El Hariri began to go a bit off script with the mention of the leftist ideology to which he belongs and defends wholeheartedly, even when it came to the arguably failed attempts to apply it throughout history. By the end of the interview, El Hariri had definitely lived up to my expectations of having a big personality even if it had been in a more subtle way than I had thought. As I finished my questions and asked him if he had anything else to add, El Hariri smiled slyly and said, “That’s enough, you’ve tired me out today.”